​At a time of year when many New Yorkers spend their days at the beach, it may be fitting to ponder Andrew Lipman’s fascinating new book, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (Yale University Press, 2015). Lipman, who teaches history at Barnard College of Columbia University, recently won a Bancroft Prize for this, his first published book, and it is an impressive and entirely well-deserved accomplishment. The young scholar approaches the subject of Europeans encounters with the Algonquian-speaking peoples of coastal New York and New England in a wholly novel way. Instead of situating the story of intercultural relations on land, as historians traditionally do, Lipman demonstrates that the actual stage and struggle for power was decided on coastal waters. Additionally, he convincingly shows that the histories of coastal New York and southern New England share many commonalities, and need to be treated as one region.

Hidden Waters of New York City: A History and Guide to 101 Forgotten Lakes, Ponds, Creeks, and Streams ​in the Five Boroughsby Sergey Kadinsky W.W. Norton / Countryman, 352 pp.

Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore, Others will watch the run of the flood-tide, Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east, Others will see the islands large and small; Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high, A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them, Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide. It avails not, time nor place -- distance avails not, I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence, Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd, Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d....Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1856)

Reviewed by Julian Cole Phillips

To Walt Whitman, the network of waterways that cross-hatched what is now New York City were a transcendental link between epochs. “These and all else were the same to me as they are to you,” he wrote. “What is it then, between us? What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us.”

By Kate Elizabeth BrownHamilton’s bustling practice exemplified a fundamental truth about marine insurance in American port cities like New York: the persistence of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars made the legalities of insurance contracts, and the extensive maritime commerce they underwrote, particularly pressing and uncertain for the young republic.

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes,belted round by wharvesas Indian isles by coral reefs –- commerce surrounds it with her surf.Right and left,the streets take you waterward.— Moby Dick, “Loomings”

For ten years she had served as home to upwards of seventy working class girls and boys on the shores of both the Hudson and East Rivers in New York City. Referred to as the “Deep Sea Floating Hotel,” the vessel had minimal qualifications to lodge, and an advertisement of the day claimed “The poorer you are, the more cheerfully you will be received, provided you are respectable.”[1] But on this day, August 6, 1915, the New York Times reported the gloomy news:

70 TO LOSE HOMES IN FLOATING HOTEL The Good Ship Stamler, John Arbuckle’s Philanthropy Will Be Dismantled.2

One afternoon this past winter, I and my new friend Bill drove over from his Jersey home to the northeast corner of Inwood, looking for something very special. We parked on 9th Avenue just north of 207th Street, next to the municipal bus garage. To the north, a fence blocked our way to the river bank, where Captain Moffat’s yard once stood. There’s no public access now to the rotting ghost-piles. But Bill and I peered through the chain link at the grimy water and the remnants of a pier under which he swam as a child as he reminisced about the water quality, even worse fifty years ago than today.

Manhattan’s major waterfront area in the late nineteenth century was located in the Fourth Ward, a district that formed an apron around the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge. In 1885, the Fourth Ward contained 30 acres of tenements that housed around 17,000 people. The area had been awash with cheap groceries, rat pits, and stale beer dives for years, and due to the growing population of transient sailors, prostitute traffic thickened exponentially; at this time in New York history, the Fourth Ward was, as historian Timothy Gilfoyle describes it, “the most significant and the poorest waterfront zone of prostitution” (218). But the waterfront was also the centerpiece of an international trade city, signifying plurality and opacity. The vortex of sailors and longshoremen from all parts of the globe swelling into and out of the shops and bars along the East River was in continuous motion. Significantly, the district appealed to no one ethnicity, class, race, or gender. Ethnically cohesive neighborhoods, or “ghettoes,” would only emerge when jobs and industries became associated with specific ethnic groups–garments for the Jewish, cigars for the Bohemians, etc. But through the 1870s and ’80s, the East Side waterfront region of New York, though perhaps mainly Irish, was still composed of workers and unemployed groups that largely allied themselves with trade and the lifestyle of the wharves rather than with any particular language, religion, or national origin.